Corporate Bond Ladders
Equity Investing
We seek to buy growing, profitable, and well-capitalized businesses at reasonable prices. The habit of relating quality to value is central to the WCA equity investing process.
Asset Allocation
A comprehensive suite of asset allocation portfolios focused on matching investment objectives with risk tolerance. Both passive and active strategies are offered.
Fixed Income
This portfolio seeks to generate a stream of income from a portfolio of 30 investment-grade corporate bonds. The portfolio is constructed as a “ladder” with maturities spanning 10 years.
Recent Commentary
The Role of Capital In The AI Boom
Artificial intelligence will be a major technology for the next generation and likely to shape our future. Effects on business automation, medicine, science, education, security, consumer services, and software could be far-reaching. Changes to come are very likely to be as important as the rise of personal computers or the internet. We do not view AI as a fad, but the current surge in AI capital spending is still a cycle. The current AI boom is being expressed first through a massive infrastructure buildout. Data centers, semiconductors, and networking gear are expanding fast. Related infrastructure, including power and cooling systems,…
Capital Spending & The Profit Cycle
Business investment has been a key driver of S&P 500 profits and performance over time (chart below). The story has two layers: a long-term structural trend of labor substitution through capital — a process underway for decades — and a sharper cyclical surge driven by AI investment today. Source: WCA, Bloomberg Over the past several decades, business investment in equipment and intellectual property has grown nearly twice as fast as the overall economy. But that long-run trend masks pronounced cycles, and history offers two useful reference points. In the late 1990s, networking capital spending pushed business investment up roughly 14%…
The Limits of Traditional Risk Measures
Ask most investors what “risk” means and they’ll point to volatility — specifically, standard deviation, the familiar statistical measure of how much a portfolio’s returns fluctuate around their average. For decades, standard deviation has been the default language of investment risk. It appears in fund fact sheets, academic papers, and advisor presentations. It is the backbone of modern portfolio theory. And it is, in important ways, an incomplete picture. Standard deviation treats upside and downside fluctuations as equally “risky.” A month in which your portfolio gains 8% is counted the same as a month in which it loses 8% in the…